Maxwell's Silver Hammer
by Shire cat
Summary: Max gets by with a little help from his silver friend. A Max-in-the-hospital story.


Max reflects after being wounded.

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I don't really know if I was running to something or running from something.

When I was younger I always thought I was chasin' some elusive thing. Something that would make itself clear in time. I mean, yeah, a lot of things were also chasin' me; teachers, guys I pissed off...and now ghosts, shadows, faces and eyes and...

_Jesus._

I was so convinced I was going to _be _something. Not Mr. Ivy League. Not a three-piece-suit lawyer, but _me_. Just who I was fully. All I could be. Nothing and everything. I was so convinced that I was doing something just by _being_. We were _doing _something on that campus with our stupid pranks, sticking it to other rich pricks who weren't as self-aware and capable of hating our backgrounds as we were and the teachers who were only repeating the rich-to-upper-middle class white-man shit that they'd been spoonfed. Then later, the marches, the acid, the pot...showing everyone Hey! There's a whole 'nother world out here and look at us living in it! Yes, we 'dare disturb the _fuckin' _universe_'_! Don't you get it, man? We ARE the universe!

The drugs there were drugs and the drugs were great but _life_ was the real high. 'You _have _to listen to us; we're _protesting_! We're the_ people_! The people you corrupt suits are supposed to _serve_!'

I was so convinced that _we _were something, that _I _was something. I stood for the life of no absolutes and absolutely nothing. Of doing nothing if not everything and everything for nothing.

Sounded better through the hazy corona of optimism.

Clinically speaking I'm just a spoiled child in a slacker generation. One of those who don't know 'how good they have it'. Just a bratty kid who craved attention and didn't grow out of it 'till I was shocked by the reality 'fighting for freedom' and 'what it really takes to make the country, the world safe'. Rebellious byproduct of too good of a home whose only 'epiphanies' came from killing my brain cells with God Knows What Chemicals. I'm What's Wrong With Kids Today.

_God. _

My principals didn't protect me, I'll give them that.

'Mr. No Absolutes' got stuck fighting in a war I didn't believe in, for a government I don't trust and no principles or ideals to speak of. I don't know what the hell they were fightin' for. People were dying, yeah, Communists were gaining ground, but none of that meant anything to me. It still doesn't. Plenty of guys from our side died, I know that. None of them really my friends but they were human, you know? They were people. Flag –waving assholes who couldn't wait to serve their country, mostly, or dumb, scared bastards like me who had no idea why they were there.

And they all met the same fate.

Exterminated, racked up like so many numbers. Or bodies and minds all screwed to hell.

Shit, man, I saw it happen. And I don't know how I could keep watching it, how I lasted so long but I did. Maybe I was just biding my time 'til that bomb was gracious enough to land right in front of me.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep…_

Yeah, baby, slip me into unconsciousness, hell, I'll be obliged if you do me one better but I know that won't happen any time soon.

I'm not as bad as some guys. They pray for it.

My fire's burned out.

The guy who was always doing, moving, the guy who was always trying to get farther _out there _now can't get far enough inside himself.

Uncomfortably numb.

It feels bad when I'm only half-under, drug or self induced, because it's then that I'm conscious of what I'm doing to myself, that I know(or care) that I should try to break myself out of it, to swim back to the surface and try to rebuild me or, at least, find me. I see that I'm a shell, a broken eggshell on the floor trying in vain to protect what's inside. And it's a big, damn, Sisyphean hill that I have to climb, and tiny pieces, so small to put back together and I can't find all of them…I can't do it.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep…_

My little hammer full of liquid peace, bangin' me into oblivion.

Sometimes on my better days I wonder how they are; Lucy, Jude, Pru, all of them. I wonder what they're doing and why, what's it like to be a world where there are still no bombs, no bodies, no shrapnel. I know they're fightin' battles over there, but they can't be as bloody as these. I wonder if they still care about the cause or about me. I childishly think it's easy to forget me while I'm over here. There were lots of letters in the beginning but censorship got too tight and it wasn't worth it as often for either side, I guess. They're rare but they come, which is nice.

Most of the time they just feel like another world, like they never really happened. Sometimes it's hard for me to think I drove a taxi every day, tripped out, listened to people, friends sing and play music. That me and my sister lived the life we thought was so exotic and found a whole fuckin' _Famous Five _crew to live it out with. Like it was some beautiful, crazy-ass dream and this is the reality, the real world I've been avoiding all along. _Killing_ and _pain _and _survival_…

The alpha and_ fuckin'_ omega.

That little hammer of mine's gonna be poundin' out a death knell for me one of these days.

_Bang! Bang! _

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"Do I dare disturb the universe?"- .T.S Eliot

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep."-Robert Frost


End file.
